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Introduction

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Throughout recorded history, humankind has asked big questions about the universe: How large is it? Is it finite, or does space go on forever? How old is it, or has it always been here, and will it last forever? Where in the universe are we—the center? Or does it even have a center? Is the universe fundamentally chaotic or orderly? If it is ordered, is this order constant through time? Or is it perhaps evolving, decaying, still being created, or going through cycles of creation and destruction?

The quest to find answers to such questions about the origin, history, and future of the universe and its structure and order is called cosmology. This word in fact comes from the Greek word kosmos, meaning “order,” and “the world.”

Ancient Ideas

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Until the last few centuries, these questions remained the province of religion and philosophy. Different cultures and traditions, at different times, offered a wide variety of answers. As for our place in the universe, a common view was the geocentric one—that Earth is at the center. This model was developed in detail by the ancient Greeks, culminating with the elaborate theory of Ptolemy of Alexandria in about ad 150.

As for the history of the universe, some thinkers believed it to be eternal and unchanging. Others, perhaps inspired by such natural cycles as day and night and the seasons, thought that it was cyclic. These thinkers believed that the universe went through a series of ages, including a golden age, in which they believed themselves to be living. They believed that, after the total destruction of the universe in an age of fire, the entire cycle of ages would be repeated.

The great religious traditions of the world also have had much to say about this matter. Eastern thought, including Hinduism, generally has subscribed to the notion of cyclical time. The monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, however, have taken a much different view—that the universe was created at a definite time in the past and exists in much the same state until an end of some kind at a definite time in the future. Such a linear concept of time meshed well with the idea that the creator had a plan and purpose for the universe and that such a purpose would be fulfilled in the course of history.

Science Approaches the Problem

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The advent of the methods of modern science had a huge impact on cosmological thought, beginning with the heliocentric (Sun-centered) theory of Nicolaus Copernicus in the 16th century. Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of Copernicus’ theory was that it displaced Earth from the center of the universe, making it just one of many planets orbiting the Sun. While slow to be accepted, this idea was reinforced by the work of Johannes Kepler and Galileo. It helped lead, in the late 17th century, to Isaac Newton’s great synthesis of the Earth and the heavens—his theory of universal gravitation, combined with his laws of motion. Before 1600 most European thinkers had followed the ancient Greeks in conceiving of the Earth and the heavens as rather separate realms, with different behaviors. Newton, however, explained terrestrial and celestial motions with the same laws, including a force called gravity, which operated throughout the universe.

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Newton quickly realized that gravity, which is an attraction between each body and every other body in the universe, would cause everything to collapse to a common center—if there were one. He philosophically objected to such a fate and so proposed a spatially infinite universe, with no such center defined. He was not the first to propose an infinite universe, however. Giordano Bruno had suggested this nearly a century earlier, even proposing that the stars are other suns, around which might orbit inhabited planets.

With regard to time, Newton, who considered himself a theologian as well as a scientist, relied on his Christian religious beliefs. He believed that God had created the universe at a definite time in the past, giving all bodies their initial motions. Ever since, the God-given laws of motion and gravity had directed the planets in their courses.

By the late 1800s geologists and biologists had collected evidence suggesting that the Earth was at least hundreds of millions of years old, much older than had been thought. In fact, to many it seemed reasonable that it, and the universe, had always existed, and probably would continue into the infinite future. There were dissenting opinions, though, at least regarding the ages of the Earth and Sun. Physicists such as Lord Kelvin calculated that the Earth, apparently still molten inside, should have cooled to a solid throughout if it were more than about 40 million years old. Similarly, astronomers figured that the Sun, which was believed to shine because of energy from gravitational contraction, could not be more than a few tens of millions of years old, since it could not have sustained this output for so long without a drastic reduction in size.

The discovery of radioactivity by Henri Becquerel in 1896 led to a solution to both problems. The Earth could be heated internally by the radioactive decay of elements such as uranium, which could last billions of years. The Sun, it turned out, shines by nuclear fusion, giving it a potential lifetime of at least 10 billion years. Finally, radioactive dating of rocks indicated that the Earth was at least a few billion years old. With this new information, it again seemed that the universe could be extremely ancient, and perhaps eternal.

A common view at this point, among those scientists even considering the problem, was that the universe is infinitely large and infinitely old, with an infinity of stars. Thinkers as far back as Kepler, however, had noted a problem with this: the sky is dark at night. A simple mathematical analysis shows that in a starry universe infinite in space and time, every possible line of sight in the sky should lead eventually to the surface of a star. The entire sky thus would be brilliant, even at night.

This problem, known as Olbers’ paradox (after Wilhelm Olbers, who discussed it in the 1820s), has a number of possible solutions, all of great cosmological significance. The simplest solutions are that either the universe is not infinite, or not infinitely old, or both. If, for instance, it had a definite beginning, only those stars whose light had had time to reach Earth would be visible to us today. Interestingly, perhaps the first person to advance this argument in print was the poet Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote about it in an obscure work called “Eureka,” published in 1848. Poe also suggested the possibility of an expanding universe, long before professional scientists—who probably never read the work—thought of the idea.

Another Revolution in Cosmology

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In 1905 Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity, which showed that space and time can be seen as aspects of a deeper structure, space-time, and that mass and energy are really the same thing. In 1916 he followed this with his theory of general relativity, in which gravity is understood as a warping, or bending, of space-time by the presence of mass. This new theory of gravity, which has passed a number of experimental tests, paved the way for the modern scientific study of cosmology.

Einstein soon realized that his basic equations, in their simplest form, required that the universe be either expanding or contracting. Its matter—along with space itself—would be either flying apart or falling together. Einstein, like most astronomers at the time and much like Newton two centuries before, objected to such a conclusion. He favored instead the idea of a static universe, one essentially unchanging through infinite time. He realized that his equations could include a special term, called the cosmological constant, which could supply a sort of repulsive force, capable of balancing gravity and keeping the universe static. While it might be simpler to leave it out (by assigning it a value of zero), Einstein assigned it a positive value so that the universe would be essentially unchanging, as he expected.

The Expanding Universe

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In 1929, however, Edwin Hubble announced an amazing discovery—evidence that the universe actually is expanding. In the mid-1920s astronomers had found that a class of cloudlike objects, then called spiral nebulae, are actually huge, distant groups of billions of stars, now called galaxies. Hubble’s analysis of their light showed that, with the exception of a few of the closest ones, they are all moving away from Earth, many at tremendous speeds. When Einstein realized that he had held in his hands the monumental prediction of a universe evolving through time and had then undone it with the cosmological constant, he called it the “greatest blunder” of his life.

To determine the distances to other galaxies, Hubble compared the brightness of certain giant stars in these galaxies to the brightness of presumably similar stars in our own galaxy, whose distances had been calculated by a number of other, overlapping methods. To determine the speed at which a galaxy was receding from Earth, he observed its spectrum. Dark lines in the spectrum of colors can be identified as being produced by specific elements known on Earth. For these galaxies, the lines were shifted away from their normal wavelengths toward the red, long-wavelength part of the spectrum.

This effect is known as redshift. It is similar to the Doppler effect for sound, in which, for instance, a train whistle’s pitch seems to drop as the train passes by. The sound waves from the receding train whistle are stretched out behind the train and arrive at the listener with a longer wavelength and thus a lower pitch. The wavelengths of light from a receding object are likewise stretched longer, making the light appear redder than it would otherwise.

Hubble plotted recessional speeds of galaxies versus their distance from Earth and found that the more distant ones were moving away at proportionally greater speeds, so that the graph formed nearly a straight line. This relation is known as Hubble’s law. It can be written v = H × d, where v is the velocity of recession, d is the distance to the galaxy, and H is the slope of the line and is called the Hubble constant. According to this, for example, a galaxy twice as far away from an observer as another galaxy is moving away from the observer twice as fast.

It is important to realize that this expansion is not best thought of as galaxies rushing away from each other through preexisting space, but rather as an expansion of space itself, which “carries” the galaxies with it. With this in mind, the redshift can be considered as the effect of space having stretched since the light was emitted. Light emitted when the universe was half its current size, for example, would now be seen to have twice the original wavelength.

The Uniform Universe

The distribution of the galaxies Hubble studied also provided evidence of the cosmological principle—two important properties that the universe is assumed to have. At large scales the universe is isotropic, or looks about the same in all directions, and homogeneous, or is about the same everywhere. If the positions of vast numbers of galaxies were plotted to form a map of the observable universe, their large-scale distribution would look roughly the same from all angles and in all regions.

This means that, even though we see other galaxies rushing away from us, we cannot claim to be located in the “center”; an observer anywhere in the universe would see about the same thing. Every cluster of galaxies, including ours, is receding from all others as space expands. This is in many ways an extension of the Copernican notion of Earth’s location in the cosmos being typical, rather than unique or privileged.

Looking Backward: The Big Bang

Hubble’s findings about the expansion of the universe have a very interesting implication. If the motion of the galaxies is traced back in time, it implies that they were once all in the same place—“here.” The universe would have then been greatly compressed and therefore very dense and hot. Assuming a constant rate of expansion, modern values of this constant imply that this state existed some 13–14 billion years ago, though calculations that include gravitational slowing of the expansion make it a bit more recent. This scenario—of a universe that “exploded” out of an extremely tiny, dense, and hot initial state—became known as the big bang theory. In the 1920s Georges Lemaître and Aleksandr Friedmann proposed early versions of such a model, which George Gamow and other cosmologists modified in the 1940s.

Tracing the expansion of the universe back toward its presumed origin can be thought of as like playing a movie backward. As one “rewinds,” one finds the universe’s average temperature increasing, much like that of a gas being compressed. At an age of a few hundred thousand years, the temperature would have been thousands of degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius, thus stripping atoms of their electrons. If one could have witnessed this state, there would have been a brilliant glow coming from all directions. Calculations show that at about a second after the beginning, temperatures would have been billions of degrees. Under such conditions the nuclei of atoms would be smashed apart into their constituent neutrons and protons. At even earlier times, neutrons and protons would be broken up into the quarks of which they are made. These would be embedded in a soup of radiation—mainly gamma rays—along with electrons and positrons.

Predictions of the big bang theory

Two crucial predictions emerge from this scenario. Playing the movie forward again, one finds that in the rapidly cooling universe, only a fraction of the protons and neutrons would have had time to fuse together to form elements heavier than hydrogen, which has only one proton. Calculations show that, by the time this fusion ended about a few minutes after the beginning, the cooling gas would have consisted of nearly 75 percent hydrogen, about 25 percent helium, and trace amounts of deuterium and lithium. One would expect this primordial 3:1 hydrogen-to-helium ratio to dominate the universe even today.

The second prediction involves the light produced by the radiant heat of the early universe. Before the formation of atoms, the particles of light, called photons, frequently scattered off of electrons, which were not yet incorporated into atoms. As atoms formed about 400,000 years after the beginning, the light finally had a clear path. Light that was thus released at a great distance should just now be reaching us. It would be coming from parts of the universe receding from us at nearly the speed of light, so that it would be greatly redshifted, all the way into the microwave region of the spectrum. This microwave glow should be coming from all directions in the sky, with almost uniform intensity.

Evidence for the big bang theory

The first of these predictions was quickly supported by spectroscopic studies. Indeed, the visible matter in the universe does appear to be mostly hydrogen and helium, in about a 3:1 ratio, with only small amounts of heavier elements. However, the existence of most elements heavier than helium, such as what the Earth—and people—are made of, required an explanation. This was soon accounted for by studies of fusion reactions that power the stars. Stars produce heavier elements in their cores, and some of these stars explode or otherwise expel matter, enriching the universe with a fairly small but significant amount of matter heavier than helium.

Interestingly, the term big bang was originally intended as a derisive one; it was coined in the 1940s by Fred Hoyle, who championed a competing model known as the steady state theory. In that model, the universe is expanding, but its general appearance and composition remain constant through time, as new matter is gradually created to fill in the gaps left by matter that has spread out. The universe would be infinitely old and would last forever. For a decade or so, mainly in the 1950s, this theory enjoyed significant support.

Photo AURA/STScI/NASA/JPL (NASA photo # STScI-PRC98-01)

Discoveries in the 1960s, however, weighed heavily against the steady state theory. Especially groundbreaking was evidence in 1965 to support the other crucial prediction of the big bang theory: a nearly uniform glow of microwaves is indeed coming from every direction in the sky. Eventually satellite observations, including those from the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) launched in 1989, showed that the spectrum of this radiation was of the type known as a blackbody spectrum, which is the kind expected to result from a hot, glowing gas such as that of the early universe. Furthermore, its wavelength (about 1 centimeter, which corresponds to a temperature of only about 3° Kelvin) matched closely calculations of just how redshifted this light should be now. This “wall of light,” called the cosmic background radiation, is exactly what the big bang model predicts, so the theory gained very wide acceptance.

Looking Forward: The Fate of the Universe

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Cosmologists of the 20th century had also been considering how the universe might develop in the future. In the 1920s Aleksandr Friedmann had used general relativity to develop a set of models representing three possible universes with the cosmological constant set to zero. One possibility is a universe that would expand for a time but eventually collapse back to a very dense state. Such a universe would be finite in volume and yet have no edges, a condition called closed. Its geometry is described as having “positive” curvature, somewhat like the surface of a sphere. Another possibility is an open universe, which would expand forever and be infinite in size. Its geometry would have a “negative” curvature, somewhat like a saddle. A third possibility is that the universe might be precisely balanced on the line between open and closed. Its space would be flat, with no net overall curvature. A flat universe (with no cosmological constant) would expand forever, but gravity would slow the expansion so that its rate would approach ever nearer to zero.

The deciding factor between these fates is the universe’s density of matter and energy. The density needed to render space flat is called the critical density. With a density greater than this, the mutual gravitational attraction of all matter in the universe would slow the expansion enough to stop it and then lead to collapse. In other words, the universe would be closed. With less than critical density, however, the attraction would also slow the expansion but not enough to ever reverse it. In that case the universe would expand forever and be open.

Difficulties and Their Solutions

Many astronomers have been attracted to the idea of a flat universe, for a variety of reasons. For one, for the universe to be even remotely near critical density today, it must have been astonishingly close to critical density early in its history. It seems odd to many to have something be so nearly perfect without being absolutely perfect. Studies of the amount of visible matter in the universe, however, suggested that there was not nearly enough to render the universe flat.

Furthermore, for the universe to be anywhere close to flat today within the standard big bang model, however, it had to have been “fine-tuned” to astonishing precision very early in time. At one second after the big bang, for instance, had the matter in the universe been a billionth of a percentage point over the critical density, the universe would have quickly collapsed in a “big crunch.” Had it been less dense by a similar amount, the universe would have expanded so quickly that galaxies as we know them could never have formed.

The remarkably smooth nature of the universe observed today—that it is roughly the same in all regions and all directions—also is difficult to explain with the standard big bang model. Early in that model, parts of the universe widely separated from each other would not have had time to have been in contact with each other via the fastest signal known: light. For example, the temperature of the cosmic background radiation in different far-flung regions of the universe is very nearly the same. How did this occur without these regions ever communicating? Without such communication to provide the uniformity in a natural way, the early expansion of the universe would have to have been extremely well “choreographed.” While one can simply suppose that the conditions were just right, a more natural explanation would be very desirable.

Inflation

Inflation theory, a modification of the big bang theory developed by Alan Guth and others from about 1980, provided possible solutions to a couple of these problems. In inflation theory, at only a tiny fraction of a second after the start of expansion, the rapidly cooling universe became “trapped” in a state called a false vacuum. Such a state has the curious effect of making gravity a repulsive, rather than attractive, force. This propelled the early universe into an extremely fast expansion. This rapid expansion flattened space and also allowed regions already in communication to become spread over vast regions, thus explaining the high degree of uniformity seen today. After this, the universe underwent a dramatic transition to a true vacuum, releasing vast amounts of energy that reheated the universe and eventually condensed into all the matter seen today.

Although inflation produces a broadly uniform universe, it also predicts a fairly specific amount of irregularity—about the amount needed to serve as seeds for the gravitational clustering that led to the formation of galaxies. This clumpiness is a natural result of quantum mechanics, which predicts that even in a vacuum, tiny, rapid fluctuations in local energy occur all the time. Inflation would suddenly expand these microscopic irregularities so greatly that they would be the size of galaxies today, leaving their greatly magnified imprint on the cosmos. In 1992 the COBE satellite detected small temperature fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation, thus adding support to the inflationary scenario.

Most cosmologists accept some version of inflation as part of the overall big bang picture, though some of the details of inflation are still unclear. (It is hoped, for example, that the false vacuum state will be shown to be a natural prediction of particle physics, but at the moment the underlying theories do not seem complete.) Inflation extends our account of the universe’s history back to only 10−35 (1 divided by a 1 followed by 35 zeros) second after the beginning of time. Before that, the picture becomes blurred, and at 10−43 (called Planck time) it is very uncertain, since conditions were so extreme that current theories of gravity and quantum mechanics are believed to be inadequate.

Dark Matter

In the late 20th century perhaps the most important question facing cosmologists was whether the universe had critical density. Surveys of visible matter in the universe fell far short, with only about 1 percent of the necessary mass. However, studies of velocities of stars in galaxies and of galaxies in clusters had shown that more matter must be present. Their speeds were often so high that more gravity—and apparently more mass—was required to keep them from flying apart. This unseen matter was dubbed dark matter, and it seems to exist in at least two forms. Some of it surely consists of well-understood objects such as undetected planets, brown dwarfs (bodies just short of having enough mass to become stars), neutron stars, and black holes. Still, these objects and visible matter together probably make up less than 5 percent of the critical density.

Computer simulations of early galaxy formation seem to require additional matter, though, to provide enough gravitation to produce the clustering of galaxies seen today. These simulations work well only when this matter is “cold,” meaning that its particles are moving slowly relative to each other. This cold dark matter is not made of protons and neutrons like ordinary matter. It is thought to account for another 20–25 percent of the critical density. All together, these types of matter likely provide about 25–30 percent of the needed mass and therefore seemed to leave the universe open and destined to expand forever.

Dark Energy and the Runaway Universe

Another problem was brewing, though. By the mid-1990s, data flowing in from several sources, including the Hubble Space Telescope, allowed newly refined values of the Hubble constant. When applied to models of the universe with anywhere near the critical density, the new estimates of this constant gave a universe no more than about 10 billion years old. Estimates of the ages of the oldest stars continued to be at least 12 billion years. Some cosmologists began to reluctantly consider Einstein’s abandoned cosmological constant, this time not to make the universe completely static, but rather to buy it more time so that it could indeed contain objects as old as these oldest stars.

Astronomers conducted two separate studies in 1998, basically to extend Hubble’s graph to unprecedented distances. It was hoped that these would help pin down the rate at which the universe’s expansion was slowing down and thus determine its ultimate fate, independently of surveys attempting to find dark matter. The two studies used observations of a type of supernova—a class of brilliant exploding stars of rather predictable brightness, observable even in distant galaxies. By relating the supernovae’s distances (determined from their apparent brightness) with the observed speeds of their recession, a history of the universe’s expansion rate can be determined.

The results were very surprising. Distant supernovae appeared fainter than expected, considering the amount of redshift of their light. If a galaxy appears surprisingly faint, it must be surprisingly far away. The light thus must have taken surprisingly long to get here. Since the redshift indicates how much the universe has expanded since the light was emitted, this means that the universe took surprisingly long to reach its current size. The universe must have been expanding more slowly in the past. These results indicate that the expansion is actually speeding up! Extensive checking of the results confirmed the finding, and now it is widely accepted that the universe is somehow blowing itself apart.

The question immediately arose as to how this could happen, since gravity is an attractive force and should be slowing the expansion. The answer is that, apparently, some kind of cosmic repulsive force is at work. Unlike gravity, whose strength diminishes with distance, this force apparently grows in strength with distance. Cosmologists quickly recognized that Einstein’s cosmological constant would produce just such an effect.

While the cosmological constant nicely describes this new force, it does not clearly specify its origin or nature. Cosmologists have scrambled to provide a physical basis for its existence and have proposed a number of ideas. The leading contender at present appears to be “dark energy,” which fills the cosmos and provides a sort of negative pressure to drive the accelerated expansion. It now seems that this dark energy makes up about 70–75 percent of the universe’s mass/energy content. This would supply the needed energy to reach the critical density, so the universe would be flat. Despite the strangeness of this discovery, the good news is that with slower expansion in the past, the model yields a universe 13–14 billion years old, which can accommodate the oldest stars.

NASA/WMAP Science Team

Using the latest information on the expansion rate and the various mass and energy densities in the universe, cosmologists have constructed computer models to study how matter and radiation interacted in the early universe. These models make very specific predictions about the amount of clustering in stars, galaxies, and clusters and superclusters of galaxies. To check these predictions, astronomers have undertaken exhaustive mapping efforts—such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the 2dF (Two-Degree Field) surveys, and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP)—to find the actual distribution of matter in the universe. The results so far appear to fit the theories very well indeed, adding to scientists’ confidence that their overall picture of an accelerating inflationary big bang universe is at least close to the truth.

Remaining Questions

Huge advances in our understanding of the cosmos have come in recent years, but many questions remain. Will the big bang scenario continue to account for the flood of new data on the universe’s structure? What is the nature of the mysterious dark energy, and will it really produce eternal expansion? What exactly caused inflation, and will this scenario be supported by more complete theories of particle physics? Will a hoped-for theory of quantum gravity be able to describe the universe at its earliest instants? What caused the universe to come into existence in the first place, and are there other such universes? Some of these questions may never be answered with certainty, but cosmologists will continue to seek answers. If history is any indicator, surprises may well await us.

Thomas J. Ehrensperger

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